Mistress of mistresses (40 page)

‘I
speak,' said he, 'as men speak. And indeed I have thought may be there is in
very deed a kind of death, as of foolish bodies who say, Tush, there is no
spirit: or others, Tush, there is no sense. And have not old men ere this
become dead before their time, with forgetting that this winter of their years
is but a limbeck of Hers for trying of their truth and allegiance, as silver
and gold are fined and tried in the fire? But, even as 'twas always that the
cat winked when her eye was out, so they: 'stead of hold fast and trust in Her
to bind up and bring back and give again hereafter.'

'Are
you, to say, old?' said Campaspe, marrying queen of spades and king of hearts.

.Vandermast
smiled. 'I am, at least, no more fit for past youth-tricks.'

'No
more?'

'I
speak,' said he, 'as of here and now.' "What else is there?' said she.

Vandermast
stroked his white beard. 'It may be, nothing.'

'But
you spoke but now,' said Zenianthe, putting very gently a fresh log on the fire
so that the flames crackled up, and that oread lady, with the doctor's knees
for her pillow, turned in her sleep: 'you spoke of "hereafter".'

'It
may be,' said Vandermast, 'that "hereafter" (and, by like process of
logic, "heretofore") is here and now.'

Campaspe
turned up the seven of diamonds. 'What is old age?'

'What
is youth, my little siren of the oozy quagmires and wood anemones in spring and
sallow catkins where the puss-moth feeds at dusk of night?'

'Well,
it is us,' she said.

'As
for old age,' said Zenianthe, 'the poet hath it—

My
grief lies onward and my joy behind.

That
for age. And for youth I would but turn the saying, and say—

My
joy lies onward/

'Who
taught you that?' said the learned doctor. 'My oak-woods,' answered she.

He
mused for a while in silence. Then, 'It is of divine philosophy,' he said, 'to
search lower into the most darkness and inspissation of these antinomies which
are in the roots of things. I am old;' and his eyes overran the sleeping beauty
of Anthea, stretched feline at her length. Scarcely to touch it, his finger
followed her hair where it was pressed upwards in aureate waves from under her
left brow and cheek where her head lay on his knee in the innocence of slumber.
'I am old; and yet, as the Poetess,—

I
love delicacy, and for me love hath the sun's splendour and beauty.'

Zenianthe
said, 'We know, sir, who taught you that.'

Still
Lessingham, upon the stairs, stood and listened. Their backs were towards him.
Vandermast replied: 'Yes: She, ingenerable and incorruptible. Are youth and age
toys of Hers? How else? seeing She plays with all things. And age, I have
thought ere now, is also a part of Her wiles and guiles, to trick us into that
folly which scorneth and dispraiseth the goods we can no more enjoy. Then,
after leading of us as marsh-fires lead, through so many turn-agains, unveil
the grace in Her eyes: laugh at us in the end.'

'Love
were too serious else,' said Campaspe. She fetched for the queen of hearts the
king of clubs: 'Antiope: Lessingham.'

'What
is Lessingham?' Zenianthe asked the fibre. 'What is Barganax?'

'What
am I?' asked Vandermast. Tell me, dreamer and huntress of the ancient
oak-woods, is it outside the scheme that there should be, of young men, an old
age wise, unrepentant, undisillusioned? I mean not some supposititious
mathematical
esse formale,
as some fantastics dream, but bodied, here and
now? For truly and in sadness, searching inward in myself I have not once but
often times—' he fell silent.

'What
is here and now?' Zenianthe said, gazing into the heart of the fire with brown
dreaming eyes.

Vandermast
was leaned back, his head against a cushion, his lean hands slack, palms
downwards, on the seat on either side of him. He too gazed in the fire, and,
may be for the hotness of it, may be for the lateness of the hour, the gleam of
his eyes was softened. 'As part of Her peace?' he said. 'As part of Her
pleasure?—O gay Goddess lustring, You Who do make all things stoop to Your
lure.—Seeing all the pleasures of the world are only sparkles and parcels sent
out from God? And seeing it is for Her that all things,
omnia qua existunt,
are kept and preserved,
a sola vi Dei,
by the sole power of God alone?'

Zenianthe
spoke: 'And of lovers? Will you not think a lover has power?'

'Love,'
said that aged man, 'is
vis
Dei.
There is no other
power.'

'And
to serve Her,' said Campaspe, still sitting on her heels, still playing on the
floor, '(I have heard you say it): no other wisdom.'

'To
shine as stars into everlastingness,' said that hamadryad princess, still
looking in the fire.

For
a few minutes none spoke, none stirred, save only for Campaspe's playing her
little game. Lessingham, upon the stairs, noted how the learned doctor, as old
men will, was fallen asleep where he sat. Campaspe, noting it too, softly swept
up her cards. She stood for a moment looking at him so sleeping, then on
tiptoe came and bent over him and, very prettily and sweetly, kissed his forehead.
Anthea, turning in her sleep, put up a hand and touched his face. Lessingham
very quietly came down the stairs behind them and so from the stair-foot to the
door. Only Zenianthe, sitting quite still, turned her head to watch him as he
passed.

Lessingham
went out and shut the door behind him and stood alone with that garden and the
summer night. Under stars of June he stood now, in an awareness like to that
which once before he had known, upon that night of feasting in her Rialmar: as
then before the pavane, a hardening of sensual reality and a blowing away of
dreams. Only no hardness was in this lily-scented night: only some perfection;
wherein house and slumbering garden and starry sky and the bower of radiance
southeastward where the moon, unseen, was barely risen behind Zenianthe's
oak-woods, seemed now to flower into a beauty given them before all
everlastingness. Slowly between sleeping flower-beds he walked to the eastern
end of that garden and stood watching the top leaves of the oak-trees fill with
the moon-rise. In the peace of it he remembered him of someone, not Campaspe,
that had sat so a-nights upon heels before the fire, playing and talking and
listening all at once: a strange accomplishment he thought now, and had thought
so then: but as to speak of when, or who, the gentle night, as if it knew well
but would not say the answer, held its peace in a slumbrous-ness of moon-dimmed
stars.

He
looked again at her windows. There, which had a minute before been empty, and
no light within, he beheld her upon the balcony: facing the moon. From his
place in the deep shade of a yew-tree, he watched her: Antiope: all in white.
It was as if she stood upon no firm substance but on some water-wave, the most
adored beauty that ever struck amazement in the world. Almost in disbelief, as
if night had 'spoken, he heard her speak: 'You, my lord? standing there?'

Slowly
he came towards her. As spread out upon some deepening of the stillness and the
blessedness, the long churr of a nightjar sounded near. It ended, purring down
like the distant winding of a clock, into silence. ‘I could not sleep,' he
answered, under her window.

'Nor
I,' said she. All being seemed now to draw to her, as lode-stones to the
lode-star, or to a whirlpool's placid centre the waters which swirl round it
and their floating freight, both of the quick and of the dead.

'Nor
you?' said Lessingham. 'What is here, to inquiet your mind?'

Her
answer came as upon a catch in her breath: 'Deep waters, I think.'

The
wistaria blossoms hung like heavy grape-bunches below her balcony: the limbs of
the tree, lapped about and crushed in the grip of their own younger growths,
showed gnarled and tortuous under the moon. ‘I think,' Lessingham said, 'I am
broken with the fall of such as climb too high.'

Again
the nightjar trilled. Upon his left, sudden and silent it slipped from the
branch where it had lain. He felt it circle about his head: heard the strange
wild cry,
Pht! Pht!
saw it swoop and circle, its body upright as it
flew, its wings, as it flew, uplifted like a great moth's that alights or like
a bat's: heard the clap of its wings: heard Antiope's voice as in a dream, or
as the summer night stirring in the wistaria's pendent blooms: 'There is a remedy:
to climb higher.'

He
took one step and stood quivering like a dagger struck into a table. 'Ha!' he
said. 'If master but now, yet now am I water-weak.' Then in a sudden
alteration, 'Tempt me not, madonna. In action I was ever a badger: where I do
bite I will make my teeth meet.'

He
heard her say, as a star should lean to the sea, 'What boots it me to be Queen?
O think too,' her voice faded: '—howsoever they may seem chanceful,—are yet by
God.'

The
swinging heavy blossoms, brushing his face and beard, blinded him as he came
up. Standing before her in that balcony, looking down into her eyes that were
unreadable in the warm and star-inwoven darkness, 'Who are you?' he said in a
breath without voice. 'Sometimes I hardly know,' she said, leaning back as if
in a giddiness against the window-frame, her hands holding her breast. 'Except
there was a word,' she said, 'written inside a ring, HMETEPA.—'Las,' she said,
‘I remembered; but it is gone.'

'And
I remember,' said Lessingham. 'To say,
ours:
ours: of all things, ours: of you
and me, beyond all chanceableness of fortune.' Sometimes so in deep summer will
a sudden air from a lime-tree in flower lift the false changing curtain, and
show again, for a brief moment, in unalterable present, some mountain top,
some lamp-lighted porch, some lakeside mooring-place, some love-bed, where
time, transubstantiate, towers to the eternities. "Tis gone!' he said.
'But you'—her body in his arms was as the little crimple-petalled
early-flowering iris that a rough breath can crush. He felt her hands behind
his head: heard her say, in breaks, into his very lips,
^‘
I cannot
give you myself: I think I have no self. I can give you All.'

Through
the wide-flung casements of Antiope's bedchamber in that wayside house came
the golden-sandalled dawn: the sky gold, and without cloud, and the sun more
golden than gold in the midst of it. The Queen said, at Lessingham's side,
'Thanks, my lord, I'll take my reins again.' As she gathered them, the thud of
galloping hooves came down the whinflower-scented air behind them, and Tyarchus
and Zenianthe, knee to knee, with Amaury thundering close upon their heels
swept round the turn from behind the screening birch-woods.

They
were nearing Rialmar when Lessingham found means of speaking with her in
private. It had been late afternoon when they turned homewards, and now, the
autumn day closing in early, the sun was setting. On their right, two-horned
Rialmar was lifted up dark and unas-saultable against clouds that drifted down
the west. The air was full of the crying of sea-mews. Southward, the wash of
the sea answered from bay to bay. The blue smoke of houses and their twinking
lamps showed about Rialmar town. Far as the eye could see from the eastern
highlands round to Rialmar, the clouds were split level with the horizon. The
dark lower layer was topped as if with breaking waves of a slate-dark purple,
and in the split the sky showed pink, golden, crimson, apple-green. Above the
clouds, a rosy flush thrilled the air of the western heavens, even to the
zenith, where the overarching beginnings of night mixed it with dusk. The turf
beneath them as they rode was a dull grey green: the whinbushes and thornbushes
black and blurred. Lessingham looked at the Queen where she rode beside him:
the cast of her side-bended eye: the side of her face, Greek, grave, unconscious
of its own beautifulness. He said: 'I had a dream.'

But
she, with a kind of daybreak in her eyes very soberly looking into his: 'I am
not learned to understand these matters; but 'twas not dreaming,' she said. 'I
was there, my friend.'

xvi

The Vicar
and Barganax

'the divells quilted anvell'    apprehensions
in kessarey
 
storms in the air
 
a fief for count
mandricard
 
'bull tread panther'